South Africa Hides Homeless Before World Cup

With the World Cup games only hours away, South Africa will be expecting over 300,000 soccer fans for the 2010 FIFA World cup and with that, they are doing a little house cleaning.

Nine cities in South

  Africa will be host to this international event--a four week long, 32 tournament game, that will have the global community glued to their television sets. But what most of the world will not see are those people who make up a large portion of South Africa--The Homeless. Within the last month of preparation, South African police have either relocated the homeless to the outskirts of the cities or arrested them. For instance, in Cape Town, Green Point soccer stadium is surrounded by high-rise hotels, families and tourist stroll the water parks all day long, and the South African officials are trying to save them from what the continent as a whole is suffering from. South Africa does not want the World Cup tourist to feel any discomfort or to be offended or bothered by any homeless South African.

This problem is not something new, the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver did the same thing, shipping their homeless to other cities. This happens every time a county is at the world stage. South African officials say that there is nothing wrong with doing a little house cleaning before your guest arrive. There are at least 300,000 people waiting for government housing, but in the mean time most of them live in Blikkiesdorp (in English Tin City) and it is about 45 minutes outside Cape Town. Tin City is quite fitting, since they are hundreds of little metals shacks in the form of a maze, where families live with their children and animals. However, not all of the those suffering are fortunate enough to live at Tin City. Some, still squatting in shacks on the side of the roads and before the World Cup around the stadium in Cape Town. Most of them depend on social workers to help them get to Tin City and then from there --governmental housing, but the wait is long, decades long.

South Africa fought long and hard to secure the 2010 FIFA World Cup and with the tourism sky high for the next 30 days and their economy doing a 360, what will South Africa do to help the homeless of their cities?  Well maybe all the money they'll be racking in for the next 4 weeks--could possibly be use to fund those homes for Tin City residents.  However, only time will tell if the government may actually do something like this for the people of South Africa.